Abstract:
A social network is a social structure made up of a set of actors (such
as individuals or organizations) and the dyadic ties between these actors. It is
becoming increasingly an important part of marketing platform of any business.
Its methodical analysis has gained significant amount of interest for researching
not only at the field of modern sociology but also at communication studies,
information science, network science etc. Different marketing managers adopt
different strategy to market their product on social networks. They face a lot
of problems while marketing their products on social networks.
On the other hand, a social network is nothing but a large graph, and hence
a graph G = (V;E) can be represented as a social network where each vertex v 2
V represents a user and there exists an edge (u; v) 2 E if the users corresponding
to vertices u and v are acquaintance. Due to the ability of mapping a social
network to a graph, it came into our mind that some of the social network
marketing problems could be mapped to graph theoretic problems. In this
thesis we list out social network marketing problems those are mappable to
graph theoretic problems. We dig into some of the problems to formulate them
in details and then we map those problems to graph theoretic problems. For
executing a direct marketing campaign which is based on social network data,
we examine different cases to cover the whole network with minimum round
of campaign. We develop a graph theoretic model for selecting seeds at a viral
marketing campaign on a social network where the existance of business rivals is
considered. We devise an algorithm to stop propagation of harmful information
on a social network. We also identify graph classes based on suitability of
campaigning.
